An Overview of Cryptographic Hash Functions

This report gives a survey on cryptographic hash functions. It gives an overview of different types of hash functions and reviews design principles. It also focuses on keyed hash functions and suggests some applications and constructions of keyed hash functions. We have used hash (keyed) function for authenticating messages encrypted using Rijndael [1] block cipher. Moreover, a parallel message digest has been implemented using VHDL. The computational complexity is O(log k) compared to O(k) in case of serial method. Mersenne Twister is a uniform pRNG suggested by Matsumoto and Nishimura [2] which provides a astronomical period of 2-1, but is not suitable for cryptographic applications. This report suggests a method for creating cryptographically secure random number using Mersenne Twister.